In Athanasius’s scheme, evil arises out of a perverse use of human freedom. Evil comes from sin. As for what sin is, Athanasius argues that it is, at root, a relational problem, a turning away from God. But since God is the ground of all being, to turn away from God is to turn into nothingness. To walk into sin is to walk into unbeing. Sin is anti-being, which is why it never delivers the happiness it promises, for it is the very opposite of being. As for the gods manufactured by the sinful imagination, they too are anti-being and therefore corrosive of all that humanity was created to be.
